[Discussion] Trans Issues and Rights

This thread is for the discussion of current events relating to trans rights, for discussion of the lives of trans people and difficulties they face, and for basic questions about the lives and experiences of trans people. (If basic questions become dominant we'll look at making a Q&A thread at that time.)

So Sophie Labelle, who does the Assignmale webcomic .. got doxed, and her site was hacked to replace everything with nazi or neonazi bullsh*t. Currently looks to be just a page with a password field.

f*ck our species.

Yet another reason to hate what Trump is doing to the US even without actively being involved. This kind of garbage is what I really worry about, as I think anything Trump does directly can be dealt with, while stuff like this is so much harder because it goes under the radar for too long.

One sweeping bill would allow state-funded adoption and foster care agencies to turn away applicants on religious grounds, denying parents who are LGBT

If only there were some sort of standard about separating... oh wait.

So cut their damn state funding and funnel it to those agencies who are not denying needful children loving homes.

I've been lazily collecting material to write about Jordan Peterson's infamous stance on gender pronouns and especially his consternation (to put it mildly) about the Ontario Human Rights Council Bill C-16. I ended up today coming across a tag on the University of Toronto's site for the bill. From this I landed on an article on Lee Airton, a U of T instructor, and their "No Big Deal" campaign and their blog "This Is My Pronoun". Thought I'd share.

Trans woman Sherrell Faulkner dies from injuries sustained in November attack

Jamie Lee Wounded Arrow, 28
Mesha Caldwell, 41
Jojo Striker, 23
KeKe Collier, 24
Jaquarrius Holland, 18
Tiara Lashaytheboss Richmond, 24
Chyna Gibson, 31
Ciara McElveen, 26
Alphonza Watson, 38
Chay Reed, 28
Kenneth Bostick, 59
Sherrell Faulkner, 46

(NB: Kenneth Bostick's name was changed in this list from a previous version - subsequent reporting showed that he was a trans man, not a trans woman.)

Lilly Wachowski painted portraits of the 27 trans women killed in 2016

Today, the Chicago’s Center on Halsted opens a special exhibit by filmmaker Lilly Wachowski titled “Say Our Names” which will run through July 11. It features twenty-seven portraits of all the trans women murdered in 2016, and it’s title references the social media movement #SayHerName, which worked to call attention to the ways in which black women and black queer women are disproportionately affected by brutality and hate violence.

GLAAD named 2016 the “deadliest year on record for transgender people.” Also, consider that doesn’t include transgender people whose deaths “were not reported due to misgendering in police reports, news stories, and sometimes by the victim’s family.”

Wachowski began painting these portraits in July, as what she called “an outlet of the overwhelming emotion I was feeling in the relentless waves of mortal acts of violence against trans people.” They were born of “the need to connect, to remember, to honor” and to “recognize these murders for what they are —a genocidal project. Trans people are under attack and trans women of color, specifically, are being singularly and systematically wiped out.”

Some of the paintings

I believe this puts the territory ahead of the federal government.

Yukon gov't protects trans and gender nonconforming people

The Yukon Legislative Assembly passed amendments to the Human Rights Act and the Vital Statistics Act on Tuesday.

f*ck yes.

There was a piece floating around recently titled "I am a Woman. You are a Trans Woman. And That Distinction Matters". This piece is an excellent response and rebuttal:

I am a cis woman, you are a trans woman, and here is why that distinction does not matter
(Richa, Medium, 2016-06-22)

An interesting thing happened last month, where a cis woman decided to argue for her right to trans exlusionary, ‘cis women-only’ spaces.

“Silenced by men first and now trans women, will women ever not feel silenced?” she wrote. She was angry about having her voice ‘policed’ for the benefit of trans women, who she thinks are not truly women. She was bewildered that she’s been called a transphobe after saying things like, “my being born with a vagina matters in the conversation around the rights of trans women”.

...

I have to admit, I am not sure what kind of response I would give to...

...while women constantly still deal with being sent dick pics, and being flashed, and forced to see penises when we never consented to. As a rape survivor this can be especially difficult for me.

Like holding trans women accountable for cis-male sh*t is clearly stupid... but at the same time, I kind of get that concern about potentially trigger stuff for rape survivors and feel like that's a conversation I would have to have someone else's help with... as a cis male, I don't even know how to talk about that.

At the same time (or at least upon further reflection) it also plays on the stereotype of trans women actually being men who want to peep and assault, and that's infuriating too. Not enough sleep last night to fully think this through.

As far as the evidence goes, I understand that gender identification is in the *brain*, not in the genitals. This woman needs to get her operating system updated. She reminds me of some of my conservative friends who believe that trans identification is just a scam for guys who want to get into women's bathrooms. They can't conceive of a *spectrum* of sexuality, or difference in brain structures and chemicals; it's all binary to them.

Just ignorant. Education takes a long time and some people don't want their little secure world disrupted by new things that would change their worldview if accepted.

Demosthenes wrote:

I have to admit, I am not sure what kind of response I would give to...

...while women constantly still deal with being sent dick pics, and being flashed, and forced to see penises when we never consented to. As a rape survivor this can be especially difficult for me.

Like holding trans women accountable for cis-male sh*t is clearly stupid... but at the same time, I kind of get that concern about potentially trigger stuff for rape survivors and feel like that's a conversation I would have to have someone else's help with... as a cis male, I don't even know how to talk about that.

At the same time (or at least upon further reflection) it also plays on the stereotype of trans women actually being men who want to peep and assault, and that's infuriating too. Not enough sleep last night to fully think this through.

My response would be "Exactly none of this is the fault of trans women, who not only also experience sexual assault, but do so at rates higher than cis women, and mind your business about what genitals someone else may have."

But I'm a woman, a rape survivor, and completely past done with coddling this crap.

Demosthenes wrote:

I have to admit, I am not sure what kind of response I would give to...

...while women constantly still deal with being sent dick pics, and being flashed, and forced to see penises when we never consented to. As a rape survivor this can be especially difficult for me.

Like holding trans women accountable for cis-male sh*t is clearly stupid... but at the same time, I kind of get that concern about potentially trigger stuff for rape survivors and feel like that's a conversation I would have to have someone else's help with... as a cis male, I don't even know how to talk about that.

At the same time (or at least upon further reflection) it also plays on the stereotype of trans women actually being men who want to peep and assault, and that's infuriating too. Not enough sleep last night to fully think this through.

I've spent a fair amount of time in bathrooms full of people with penises. You know how many penises I've seen in a bathroom? Not many. You know how many of those not many belonged to grown men? One, mine. (Kids have a tendency to a) not be self-conscious about it and b) just pull pants to ankles to use the urinal.)

Haha. Kaos, that's an interesting point. Under normal circumstances you would not see anyone's genitals in a public restroom. One exception would be when one of your intoxicated friends thinks it would be funny to pee on you. I've been the victim of this, and it's a strange rush of panic, confusion, and betrayal that washes over you while you dodge the urine stream. FYI, he missed.

We have different definitions of "friends".

kaostheory wrote:

We have different definitions of "friends". :)

I was very young, at the time, and was running with a pack of hooligans. Not my finest hour. Cell phones and the internet did not yet exist. At my current age of 47, that simply would not fly.

UK Survey finds huge surge of support for ending austerity and support for liberal issues.

The survey found increasingly liberal attitudes on personal issues, such as sexuality and abortion. Almost two-thirds of people agreed with the statement that same-sex relationships were “not wrong at all”, up from 47% in 2012, and a far cry from the 11% low point recorded in 1987 at the height of the Aids crisis. Some 55% of Anglicans say same-sex relations are not wrong at all. Just four years ago, the figure was 31%.

Pretty good!

Six out of ten under-35s now think that adults should be able to watch any film they like, suggesting more liberal views of pornography.

Cool!

Attitudes to transgender issues were measured for the first time. Although 82% described themselves as “not prejudiced at all” towards transgender people...

Excelle....

...only four in 10 felt a transgender person should be employed as a police officer or primary school teacher, suggesting a gap between private and revealed views.

...Oh FFS!

Ugh. The TERFs are at it again.

Fresh trans myths of 2017: “rapid onset gender dysphoria”
(Zinnia Jones, Gender Analysis, 2017-07-01)

If, like me, you make a habit of trawling through the darker side of opinion pieces on trans issues, you might have come across a peculiar new term: “rapid onset gender dysphoria”. This supposedly recent occurrence is described by the National Review, the right-wing Alliance Defending Freedom, Robert Stacy McCain, and others as a phenomenon of teenagers “suddenly” coming out, sometimes “in groups”, after “total immersion” in social media related to transitioning. Even a recent article in The Stranger made reference to this alleged trend...

...

Littman also states that this online survey recruited respondents via “three websites where parents had reported rapid onsets of gender dysphoria”.
...
The selection bias inherent to seeking participants from these pervasively anti-trans websites makes it unlikely that their responses would even allow for the possibility that transgender children could benefit from transitioning. Predictably, the study’s findings reflect these conspiratorial themes of transgender “indoctrination” and “contagion”...

Fun fun fun. I look forward to more bullsh*t to come at The Stranger, in the NY Times, etc. :l

Why is actual freedom so threatening to people? The truth of a person's gender expression, whatever feels appropriate to them, doesn't in the least invalidate any honest, free expression others feel is appropriate to and for themselves.

</obvious>

Because they believe the "self", vaguely intuited but never defined, is somehow separate from the body. We know now this is an illusion, but 99% of people are unaware of that... And the ones dedicated to the idea of a "soul" that exists independent of the body will strongly resist the evidence.

Robear wrote:

Because they believe the "self", vaguely intuited but never defined, is somehow separate from the body. We know now this is an illusion, but 99% of people are unaware of that... And the ones dedicated to the idea of a "soul" that exists independent of the body will strongly resist the evidence.

I don't see how this is in any way related to gender expression or how gender identity is incompatible with the concept of a soul.

If gender identity is located in the soul, it can be whatever you want. If however it is controlled by biology (brain chemistry, hormones, etc.), then it's *not* a choice you can make.

Robear wrote:

If gender identity is located in the soul, it can be whatever you want. If however it is controlled by biology (brain chemistry, hormones, etc.), then it's *not* a choice you can make.

If the soul is independent of the body, it may be that the gender of the soul and the gender of the body don't match, in which case it's not a choice. It's almost easier to explain gender dysphoria that way.

Don't give these people the credit of founding their bigotry in philosophical disagreements about the nature of the soul. (And if your argument is that they're not rational and scientific enough, just say that.)

Robear wrote:

If gender identity is located in the soul, it can be whatever you want. If however it is controlled by biology (brain chemistry, hormones, etc.), then it's *not* a choice you can make.

Why not both? Perhaps the choice only really exists once the soul is able to shed itself of the body, but until then, it's all part of being human rather than spirit. I'm still personally trying to figure out what a gender even is though because I don't have any understanding of what it really means to "feel like a woman", "feel like a man", or some other gender outside of what we are socialized to believe. For me, gender identity is the same as my biology because it's just easier that way. If I suddenly woke up tomorrow as a biological male, then I'd just identify as male because it's just easier that way. It would still be the same me either way regardless of what body I would be wearing on any given day.

They are not rational or scientific enough. But dualism is a problem for much of psychology these days.

If the soul is independent of the body, then there's no reason that gender identity should be fixed. Assuming a soul is traditional, but given that we can easily explain gender perception and variations without it, it seems unnecessary, and since we can make up anything about the soul that we care to, it seems like a cop-out. Especially given what we know about consciousness these days.

My argument is that if you're arguing from a religious perspective - a dualist perspective - there's no good reason to assume that gender identities are variable from physical gender at all. In this account, God makes us all one way - matching our genitals - and it's our choice to claim otherwise, whether that choice is lying to gain sexual access to the opposite sex, or "acting out" in rebellion or a confused reaction to trauma. I've heard these sorts of things mooted, and it seems very tied to the base assumptions that underlie dualism. The unifying idea is that people choose to sin in this way, and so accommodation is giving them respect they don't deserve. Dualism and the subjective understanding of the "soul" or self is at the root of this attitude.

On the other hand, brain chemistry and brain imaging, hormone and genetic studies, offer us a naturalistic way to look at gender dysphoria as well as physical gender issues, with the advantage that no one can claim that a person chose to have a particular brain chemistry or partially formed or surplus or missing genitalia. I'm suggesting that eventually, we'll have enough evidence to argue definitively that there's no choice about gender identity (and that includes people who don't claim any gender, and people who are gender-fluid - that's how they are wired, in this account).

Here's a more in-depth discussion of the same approach. To me, it's a lot easier to refute arguments based in religion or morality or disgust by being able to point out that the evidence so far is that there is no choice involved in being trans; that it's a physical thing just like being cis is. I didn't choose to be cis, and the same is true for trans people (unless I've been misinformed). I find it's really hard for people to argue against that.

Is there some reason that's not a good argument to use?

Bekkilyn, naively, if you *could* feel like either a man or woman, or neither, you should be able to do that regardless of your physical genitalia. (And since sexuality is a spectrum, as is gender identity, perhaps there are some folks who'd be comfortable in any body; perhaps you're one and that's why it's easy for you to consider.) But we know that physical changes to the brain or body chemistry can change gender perception, and, for example, temporal lobe damage can change sexual attraction. So there is definitely a biological element to this stuff that has nothing to do with conscious choice.

Not trying to offend here, but I am trying to figure out if the strategy I've been using to discuss trans basics with those who fear, is incorrect.

Robear wrote:

Bekkilyn, naively, if you *could* feel like either a man or woman, or neither, you should be able to do that regardless of your physical genitalia. (And since sexuality is a spectrum, as is gender identity, perhaps there are some folks who'd be comfortable in any body; perhaps you're one and that's why it's easy for you to consider.) But we know that physical changes to the brain or body chemistry can change gender perception, and, for example, temporal lobe damage can change sexual attraction. So there is definitely a biological element to this stuff that has nothing to do with conscious choice.

Not trying to offend here, but I am trying to figure out if the strategy I've been using to discuss trans basics with those who fear, is incorrect.

Yes, that's why I was arguing it could be both in the sense of perhaps being a choice if the soul is separated from the body, but not a choice when the body is attached because of some biological basis.

There is another possible religious argument though that typically isn't used by people arguing on the religious side because they generally *want* gender to be a choice, so they will mold their biblical interpretation to match. An alternate argument is this: It may be part of God's original design for one's gender to match one's biological sex, but as our world is corrupted with sin, God allows for the consequences of that sin. So people are born with various things that now occur in our natural world that were not part of that original plan, including genders that don't match up completely with biology, or biology that doesn't match up with a gender. It's not a choice that a person makes on being born or growing up a certain way, but something that just happens due to the current sinful state of the world.

Not sure if this helps at all, but it does hopefully make the point that even using only religious arguments, there are still multiple perspectives that do not all point to "a person chooses gender" in the way that some people want to insist is true.

I think the more fundamental thing here is:

These people are squicked out by the idea of people choosing transition. They're very emotionally invested in that position, and you have a mixture of folks looking for any excuse they can find to justify their feelings of disgust, and other folks looking for any excuse they can find to convince others to join them in their disgust.

I think part of it may also be that if more young people transition when they're young rather than later in life, more and more of the excuses they already have become ridiculous. "Trans women aren't really women, they were socialized as men!" holds less water the more young people have access to transition-related care. So, things like this that express "concern" and argue that young people should be made to wait until they're "sure", because that's better, yeah?

But the same people also argue against access to puberty-blocking drugs, which means that any trans kids who are there are going to suffer and deal with the after-effects of a puberty they desperately wanted to avoid. And that suffering makes people hold off even longer, doubting whether the world can ever see them as who they truly are.

And the same people also argue that trans people should be kept out of certain spaces because their obvious non-cisness is so disturbing to see... which means that folks who transition later are going to have a rougher time, etc. etc.

It's all just... a giant mess. And it all comes down to a fundamental prejudice against transgender people and the very idea that some people are transgender.

So yeah... here... what they're trying to do, fundamentally? They're trying to convince parents that their kids who are having questions about their gender have been "brainwashed" into it. Because they know that there are plenty of parents out there who would rather believe that than that their kids are trans, and those parents will become their allies.

They have "concerns", you see. And those concerns sound reasonable, if you haven't heard all the other things they've been saying for decades. And if you find their "concerns" more convincing than anything the medical establishment says. (Because, after all, hormone therapy is big pharma. You can tell by the way I pay $10 a month for my hormones.)

Argh.

Right. So to me, that's a good reason to keep pushing the facts that we have, which indicate that it's largely biological in nature, and not a choice. I brought in dualism because the data that we have argues against it (counter to the trend of the last few hundred years, based on a few decades of discoveries) and it actually has advantages over dualism. Clockwork was curious; and I admit this is an argument that some will find disturbing for reasons not directly related to the discussion topic.

Bekkilyn, the conception of a soul that is subservient to the physical condition of the body does grievous harm to most doctrines of the soul, as well as to naturalistic accounts of consciousness. The idea is that if the soul is actually independent of the body, it has to be independent of it, not subject to it. That is, physical damage, chemicals, etc. can't damage the soul if it is independent. Likewise, if it's not, then it's also subject to the *death* of the body. It can't be both things without, by default, removing it entirely from a naturalistic account of the world, and that of course unmoors the religion from modern observations and accounts of how the world works, which is emphatically not what literalists want. They want science to be subservient to their worldview, rather than dictating it.

I'm also deeply disturbed by the idea that sin manifests itself in genetics in later generations (or at all). That's tied up with all sorts of dubious ways to view the world, such that diseases and birth defects and such are the result of violating religious codes, rather than the result of natural diseases, environmental causes and such. Slavery was justified with that doctrine. And the inverse was rationalized as well, leading to hereditary aristocracies and even eugenics.

Scary stuff, to poor naturalistic me.

Thanks everyone for your thoughtful responses.